You don’t need a crystal ball to see that 2019’s business-to-business (B2B) marketing landscape will be more competitive, fuel the ever-growing list of marketing technology and pave the way for better and more engaging methods to reach prospects and customers. But with so many emerging trends on the horizon, where should time-pressed and resource-constrained B2B marketers focus their attention?
While I won’t try to list the myriad of marketing tactics gaining popularity over the next year, I will share five trends that I believe B2B marketing absolutely should not ignore in the year ahead.
1. Personalization
I expect B2B marketing to be even more personal in 2019. Forget multichannel or omnichannel marketing -- the channel doesn’t matter. Marketers today need only be concerned with one-to-one personalization at scale.
It’s an unacceptable marketing faux pas to not take advantage of the intel and data your audience has given you. Nobody wants to feel like an anybody, and your B2B buyers are no exception. From email to landing pages, advertisements and content recommendations, personalization isn’t just for business-to-consumer (B2C) brands anymore. Segment and tailor your experiences to make your audience feel recognized, understood and, most importantly, special.
2. Intent Data
Based on my perspective, the ability to predict what your buyers are interested in through intent data is going to completely transform the way savvy B2B marketers select content topics, create campaigns and engage their buyers in 2019.
Intent data enables marketers to understand the interests of a buying group and use those insights to improve the relevancy and value of the content they serve them. Think more visibility into a person or company’s online research -- and this visibility comes from both first-party intent data (tracking your website activity and cookie visitor engagement) and third-party intent data (a collection of data from searches on external sites).
3. Podcasts
Podcasts are making a comeback in a big way. In fact, 2018 data shows that there are 73 million podcast listeners in the U.S., and that number is expected to rise in the coming years.
The on-demand and digestible format make podcasts much easier to consume in comparison to other media. A well-done podcast can position your company as an industry expert and help you to build trust and credibility in your domain.
Not only do podcasts provide marketers with cost-effective and high-quality content sourced from industry thought leaders, but they can also help strengthen relationships with strategic accounts. Owning a podcast provides a channel for you to create relationships with your ideal clients and potential referral partners by asking them to be guests on your show.
4. Agile Marketing
Not as much a trend as a necessary survival skill, I believe effective project management will be key to building high-performing and sustainable marketing teams in the year to come. Facing similar pressures to the software developers who founded the Agile Manifesto in the early 2000s, marketers are being asked to do more with limited resources and respond faster than ever to change, and they’re required to continuously develop new and changing skill sets.
An Agile approach helps marketers avoid burnout, hit key deadlines, and improve work quality and visibility into team processes and outputs. What’s Agile all about? Agile marketing is often a hybrid combination of Scrum, Kanban and Lean principles that encourage experimentation and validated learning. Agile teams divide big work projects into small pieces, so they can test out minimum viable marketing programs, learn from them, iterate and improve.
5. Voice Search
With the rising popularity of personal voice assistants like Siri, Amazon Alexa and Google Home, B2B marketers need to be ready to adjust their search engine optimization (SEO) approach to capture voice search. To improve discoverability on search, marketers need to move beyond strategic keyword placement to create conversational content formatted in a way that is easily understood by machines.
While voice search is still in its infancy, based on what I have read and my knowledge of the industry, I believe it could surpass mobile search within the next five years, so this is a trend you are going to want to get an early start on.
As you look to execute your 2019 plans, keep these marketing trends top of mind. What top B2B marketing trends are you looking to try in 2019?
